Tuesday, September 24, 2013

What can austerity do for you?

If you are in the country imposing it on others, it can help you get re-elected.

Chancellor Angela Merkel scored a stunning personal triumph in Sunday’s national elections in Germany, becoming the only major leader to be re-elected twice since the financial crisis of 2008 and winning strong popular endorsement for her mix of austerity and solidarity in managing troubled Europe.

Golden Dawn, which has seen its popularity soar on the back of debt-stricken Greece's worst crisis in modern times, has not only set up a military wing but is actively training its members in the art of combat.
"In Golden Dawn we have an entire military structure with at least 3,000 people ready for everything," one member was quoted as saying by the Sunday Vima newspaper. Pictures of recruits in camouflage and balaclavas conducting night exercises in clandestine camps were published in another leading daily on Monday. The paper, Ethnos, claimed the men, some of who were armed with knives and wooden clubs, were being trained by members of Greece's elite special forces who sympathise with the ultra-nationalist party.

And, in twenty or thirty years, we'll discover that the US and the UK were secretly backing Golden Dawn, just as they backed the monarcho-fascists against the provisional democratic government in 1948.

I am annoyed beyond bearing by this story of Merkel's great triumph even from entirely respectable newspapers. Her coalition lost its majority and she must now form a coalition with the left which can exact some pretty nifty concessions. http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2013/09/election-affinities.html